Was Mickey Hatcher encouraging Albert Pujols to spend 2012 doing the best Wilson Valdez impression he could? The Angels fired their long-standing hitting coach last night in an attempt to revive an offense that is on pace to set a record for futility in at least one category. It’s an understandable move in some ways; […]

The Angels have spent this winter taking the most direct approach to improving a team that finished 2011 86-76 and 10 games out of first place: they went out and forked over the cash for arguably the best position player and best pitcher available on the open market. Last year’s line up of generally solid […]

Now that we’re at the point in the off season where unsigned big names are the exception rather than the norm, a team looking to go out and pick up a new player for 2012 will find their options quickly dwindling. For clubs that wait out the market there may be a nice opportunity to pick up an overlooked […]

ESPN’s Keith Law was recently asked “Which was worse; Angels getting Wells or Angels getting rid of Napoli?” KLaw’s response was to say, fairly categorically, that it was the Wells side of the deal as it had ‘zero chance of success’. My immediate reaction was to disagree, maybe in part because I’m a big Napoli […]

At the beginning of this month the Arizona Diamondbacks fired highly regarded GM Josh Byrnes and replaced him with interim GM Jerry DiPoto, a former major league reliever who pitched for the Rockies as recently as 2000. It took only a few weeks for DiPoto to drive his franchise off a cliff. The news came […]

I admit it. There was a time when I thought that the Snuggie was kinda funny. I mean, you can stay warm AND answer a telephone at the same time. It does have its merits. But look, we have to let this go. We should have done so at least a year ago, if not […]

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Last week, we asked you to vote for who you would like to see enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame. The verdict? If it were up to UmpBump readers, nobody would make it in. The leading vote getter (so far) is Jeff Bagwell, who has 60% support. Of course, in the real voting, players need […]

In what has become an annual tradition, we here at UmpBump cast our ballots for the Hall of Fame on the eve of the announcements of the voting for the real Hall of Fame. Voters can vote for anyone ever who has been retired from baseball for at least five years and is not already […]

Now that we’ve looked at every position on the diamond, as well as relief pitchers, we are nearing the end of our “Crowdsourcing the Greats” series. But before we finish, let’s turn one more time to the internet hoi polloi for answers on who the greatest baseball manager of all time was. As usual, we […]